English playwright, screenwriter, actor, director, poet and political activist. After publishing poetry as a teenager and acting in school plays, Pinter began his theatrical career in the mid-1950s as an actor. During a writing career spanning over half a century, beginning with his first play, The Room (1957), Pinter wrote 29 stage plays; 26 screenplays and many dramatic sketches, radio and television plays. Although he wrote poetry, fiction, essays, speeches, and letters, he is best known as a playwright and screenwriter, especially for The Birthday Party (1957), The Caretaker (1959), The Homecoming (1964), and Betrayal (1978), all of which he adapted to film, and for his screenplay adaptations of others' works, such as The Servant (1963), The Go-Between (1970), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), The Trial (1993), and Sleuth (2007). He also directed almost 50 stage, television, and film productions of his own and others' works.

Thematically ambiguous, Pinter’s dramas raise complex issues of individual human identity oppressed by social forces, the power of language, and the vicissitudes of memory. Although Pinter publicly eschewed applying the term ‘political theatre’ to his own work in 1981, he began writing overtly political plays in the mid-1980s, reflecting his own heightening political interests and changes in his personal life. Pinter received several honorary degrees and numerous awards and honours. Academic institutions and performing arts organizations have devoted symposia, festivals, and celebrations to honouring him and his work, in recognition of his cultural influence and achievements across genres and media. In awarding Pinter the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005, the Swedish Academy cited him for being "generally regarded as the foremost representative of British drama in the second half of the 20th century.” In January 2007 Pinter received the Légion d'honneur, France's highest civil honour.

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